Sliders

In most things, Veronica is a cautious girl. Like her big brother, she prefers to watch and wait before jumping into anything new. When greeted by “strangers” (which includes some of our neighbors whom she has known since she was a little baby), she often becomes a statue, frozen in place until they move on. But baby girl has found her thing — the one place she is fearless: the playground slide.

Since the weather has been so, so nice of late, we’ve been hitting the park nearly every day since early last week. I took the twins to the park nearest our house on Tuesday morning last week (when John was sick), and reintroduced them to the slides and swings and things. Colin tackled everything with great relish; Roni needed a lot more coaxing to do anything. 

Tuesday afternoon, we went to the playground at Ethan’s school. Veronica was running around like she owned the place, and suddenly was not satisfied with the littlest slide. She wanted to do the medium slide, and then the big one. As long as we were holding her hand, she was willing to try them all. 

Yesterday morning, we went to the corner park, which is fairly new and has some great climbing things that Colin likes. Suddenly Veronica was doing the slides by herself. I no longer had to help her sit down and scoot forward. In fact, I had to run to get to the bottom of the slide to keep her from shooting right off. 

Colin, on the other hand, is a swing guy. Where Veronica trembles with fear in the swings (and I’m talking about the bucket swings for babies here), Colin loves to go high and lean back to feel the wind in his face. He also likes to climb up and down. And to scramble right to the edge of the big drops (where bigger kids can get to the climbing ladders and poles) like he’s going right on off the edge. (The only two times I wasn’t close enough to grab him, another Mom stepped in and plucked him from the edge. But I don’t doubt that he was NOT planning to stop. The kid has no fear.)

We’ve been enjoying the abundance of neighborhood parks, along with the abundance of good weather and sunshine. The playgrounds and parks are hard sometimes with Colin not walking. He will drop down and crawl anywhere — and he nearly gets trampled when he does because no one is looking down as they’re running around. But it doesn’t seem to bother him, which in some ways is too bad. It might encourage him to try walking on his own a bit more if he wasn’t so comfortable on all fours. 

Sigh. We’ll get there eventually.